Artie Lange Says on Podcast He ‘Caved’ and Apologized for Slavery Fantasy Tweets

November 6, 2014

Last night, embattled comedian Artie Lange stopped by the Village Underground on West 3rd to appear at a live taping of the podcast Race Wars with Sherrod Small and Kurt Metzger, and he is still getting quite a kick out of his tweets about ESPN2 host Cari Champion.

“I had the audacity to say this black chick on ESPN was hot [and] I said I had a fantasy of her whipping me…and maybe I was dressed like Thomas Jefferson…and maybe I came,” he told the audience, which responded with laughter. “But in the end she gets away. She runs free. Are you pissed at that? She’s free! It’s so hard in 140 characters to explain the Revolutionary War. And I shouldn’t have tried. But people took it a little too far. So I apologized for it. I fucking caved in like the pussy that I am and I apologized.”

Champion herself has not commented on the tweets. ESPN, for its part, released a statement yesterday condemning them:

His comments were reprehensible and no one should be subjected to such hateful language. They objectify and demean one of our valued employees under the thin guise of “comedy” and are offensive to all of us. We will not dignify them with any other comment.

Lange’s appearance on Comedy Central’s @midnight was canceled during the fallout, but he’s still laughing about about the controversy, and apparently some other folks are too. Here’s a snippet from Wednesday night’s taping:

In case you missed his original tweets and the ensuing controversy the first time around, here’s the unabridged version: